SEO Starter it for Beginners
Let's begin your journey in Search Engine Optimization! We will discuss some key success factors to help you become an SEO expert in the Google Jungle. Stay with us, keep scrolling, and join the discussion below to learn more.
What is SEO:
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” SEO techniques are applied to maximize web content’s positions in “search results”. Following those principles will help you maximize your content strategy’s ROI and promote your content in the best way possible. The higher it will be on the search results pages, the more it has chances to be viewed and shared on social media, reinforcing your brand’s image regardless of what it touches.
Various web “search engines” will render things differently on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). We will focus on some historical old-school criteria of Google leading worldwide on this topic. Keep in mind that SEO purists will challenge the below and that we also have various well-known “Search Engines” such as:
- Yandex: Yandex is a popular search engine and web portal in Russia.
- Bing: Bing is a search engine installed on Windows Microsoft Edge.
- Yahoo: Still popular in Japan.
- Baidu: The reference in China.
- Qwant Junior: A great search engine for your kids.
Some facts about “Search Engine Optimization” :
- Google has an 86.19% percent market share on desktop searches.
- Google owns 94.88% of the market share on mobile searches.
- SEO focuses on deep IT techniques and content intelligence.
- What will work for one “search engine” in terms of SEO might not work for the others.
So what can I do?
Even if some advanced SEO recommendations we will approach later in this article require precise IT technical expertise, more than fifty percent of the critical success factors are linked to content and configuration. You can do it! I summarized simple tasks to get you started! Keep in mind that in 2024 you will need to know your audience, focus on users, and create fresh, relevant, and helpful content.
Foundations - Level 1 Recommendations (Short Term)
- Pick a primary keyword based on your topic (shoes, flowers, etc.), or focus on a question to answer the public.
- Write a unique and helpful piece of content between 500 and 1000 words around this keyword.
- Incorporate the keyword in the Meta Title, the page’s Meta Description, the HTML alt tags, and the filenames (example: images).
- Optimize your content for rich answers (Open Graph protocol).
- Validate that you have a clean HTML page markup.
- Check your website for speed on tools like GT Metrix.
- Link your current page to relevant internal pages (3 at max).
- Link to one external page (for example, Nike, Interflora, etc.).
- Ensure you have an HTTPS URL (SSL certificate) on your page. Then, redirect all HTTP traffic to it. You can only have one URL per page (most registrars and CMS will take care of this for you).
- Make sure to have a “Site Map” and a valid “Robots.txt” for the website and that the specific page you are working on will be in it after the publication (it is usually automatically the case).
- Ensure you have a Google Analytics tag on your site to analyze your content after publication. One is better than too many.
- Check if your external web page is ‘indexed’ with Chrome extensions such as SEO minion.
Congratulations! Your webpage now has the minimum requirements to compete on Google.
So what should I do after that? If you have completed the first steps of this article and want to go the extra mile, congratulations! Then, please find below some more advanced “level 2” recommendations to help you go even further into the SEO optimization of your content.
Intermediate - Level 2 Recommendations (Long Term)
- Monitor Google Search Console (if connected).
- Monitor Google Analytics (Audience, Bounce Rate, Geography, etc.).
- Conduct a competitor analysis with various SEO tools.
- Remediate webpage errors (Google Chrome inspector).
- Monitor the website for loading speed after every update if doable.
- Review your keyword ranking with tools like SEM Rush.
- Promote your new AND legacy content on social media.
- Establish some safe SEO partnerships and set up a “Backlinks Strategy”.
- Integrate “speakable” tags from Schema.org if not done already.
- Revisit your content slightly to establish if it needs an update.
